Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel (5 October 1936-18 December 2011) was President of Czechoslovakia from 29 December 1989 to 20 July 1992, succeeding Gustav Husak, and President of the Czech Republic from 2 February 1993 to 2 February 2003, preceding Vaclav Klaus. Havel was an important leader of the pro-democracy movement in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s as a writer, and he continued to advocate for political liberalization into the 1980s. As leader of the Civic Forum party, he played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, and he was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO eastward as President of Czechoslovakia and (after the Velvet Divorce) the Czech Republic.

Biography
Vaclav Havel was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1936, and he was refused a place at university on account of his "bourgeois descent". Instead, he worked as a laboratory assistant and a taxi driver, attending evening classes at Prague Technical University. He then obtained entry into a theatrical academy, qualifying in 1967 and becoming a stage-hand and technician. He had already begun serious writing in 1961 with Hitch-Hiking, followed by plays such as The Garden Party (1963), The Message (1965), and Difficult Understanding (1968). At this time, he opnely called for a return to the liberal intellectual democratic traditions of interwar Czechoslovakia.

Politics
Following his signature of Charter '77, as whose spokesman he acted intermittently, he spent several terms in prison, the last of which was in early 1989. By that time, he had become the leading spokesman for more human rights and political liberalization. As a result, he was chosen President by the Czechoslovak Assembly when Gustav Husak resigned in December 1989 and elected by popular vote in 1990. However, he found it difficult to cope with the day-to-day administrative tasks of government. More importantly, in his concern for social justice he disagreed with his more energetic ministres led by Vaclav Klaus over the speed of economic change and the introduction of capitalism. Refusing to preside over the division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, he resigned in 1992. He was elected President of the new Czech Republic on 26 January 1993. He continued to assume the role of moral and social conscience of a country experiencing radical economic liberalization, and he served as president until 2003. He died in 2011.